An Empire Wilderness: Travels into
Americas Future by Robert D. Kaplan
Another Brilliant Piece Of Work By Robert Kaplan
Robert Kaplan has reported from locales as diverse and chaotic as
shantytowns in the Ivory Coast, death camps in Cambodia, and the
frontlines of the war-ravaged Balkans, but his most challenging
assignment may have been covering his own country. In this ambitious
and evocative study, Kaplan vividly chronicles his travels into Americas
future, a journey that begins in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas--the starting
point for what would one day be called Manifest Destiny --and continues
across the West, where the population is growing faster than anywhere
else in the country and multiple American identities reveal a nation in flux.
He explores cities such as St. Louis and Omaha, Nebraska, that typify the
increased urban fragmentation of the heartland; onward to Tucson,
Arizona, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where great wealth and poverty exist
cheek by jowl; through the sprawl of multiethnic Southern California,
where the landscape is perched somewhere between urban and
suburban; and up through the Pacific Northwest into Canada. He also
visits towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, dipping as far south as Mexico
City, to investigate the conditions driving so many Mexicans north, despite
feverish efforts by the U.S. to keep them out, and the new cultural hybrid
being formed by this migration. Kaplan uncovers a nation polarized along
ethnic, economic, and political lines, where the uneven distribution of rapid
technological advances allows some groups to surge forward, cultivating a
radically different world-view than their poorer, less educated neighbors.
Much of his report is bleak, but despite his insistence on documenting the
worst, plenty of examples of prosperity and hope appear in these pages.
What comes across most clearly is that there is still plenty of room for
speculation on exactly how and where the new boundaries will be drawn.
In this respect, Americas future still carries the promise of the Wild West:
equal parts opportunity, possibility, and uncertainty. --Shawn Carkonen
I like to read a lot about other countries. With this book, I read about my
own country and saw it with completely new eyes -- with some alarm, and
some acceptance -- but certainly with a renewed perspective.
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